The previous post, transferred with slight edits from my other blog, will be further offered in a gesture designed to render still more complex its conceptual-art embeddedness, as an authorized edition. Details to follow someday.

I originally thought of this account of an actual dream as being situated somewhere in between Yves Klein and Tino Sehgal, but now I suppose it is more properly still stuck between Freud and Jung, with a nod to the fiction of John Crowley and China Miéville.

In Dreams....

  In Dreams Begin Responsibilities

[©? you decide.]

Early on the morning of May 11, I woke from a dream in which I had written a full review of an exhibition at a gallery in Atlanta. I was delighted that I had done the basic work of composing one of the many reviews that I still have to write, until I realized I had written about an exhibition that didn’t exist.

This is what I wrote in the dream, more or less, as best I can reconstruct it. The review is plausible because M.M. (spelled out in the review in the dream) is a large multi-gallery space that houses several independent exhibitions at the same time.

“Unwitting Underground,” at M.M., is a Buddhist-themed exhibition in one of the space’s several galleries that consists of works made from the materials left after the creation of the artworks in the other galleries. Assemblages, not all of them imitative of Sarah Sze’s approach to the problem, contain used-up tubes of paint, marble and granite chips from sculptures, trays of unsuitable found objects, and so forth. (Some viewers may be reminded of the recent show of Thornton Dial works that included wall pieces made from all the detritus he recovered from the studio floor, or of Howard Finster’s “I took the pieces you threw away....”) The work by the anonymous Buddhist artists who created the show incorporated as well all the inventory sheets, scraps of hanging wire, pizza boxes, etc.  discarded by the gallery staff during the installation of the other exhibitions.

One wall piece is a sort of webbed holster in which objects needed for the ongoing creation of art can be put on display long enough to be photographed for inclusion in the exhibition. I installed my cane, with which I hobble around to write these reviews, until the documentation was completed.

I suppose I should have waited until I finished writing, but of course then the cane would not have been part of the exhibition about which I had written.

—Jerry Cullum, May 11, 2013

All the World's Biennials (or, All the World's a Biennial, and the People on it Merely Artists)

The Third Antakya Biennial has a website that contains nothing but the presumably hypothetical dates for it, but a bit of websearching takes us also to the site of the Biennial Foundation, which facilitates the proliferation of international biennials and provides this extraordinary list of them:

http://www.biennialfoundation.org/biennial-map/

Counterforces has been effectively moribund in recent years as I shifted my focus to the concerns expressed on joculum.livejournal.com, but LJ is becoming so spam-ridden that everyone is jumping to Dreamwidth or some other blog device (those of us whose thoughts don't fit into the Facebook format most of the time).

I am thinking of starting a new blog to summarize my conclusions after seven years of joculum, and letting my art commentaries migrate back to Counterforces whether they fit the global context or not.

Just FYI, for the eight folks and one friend (as Blogger somehow delineates them) who follow this one. I would say you are all my friends.

the Third International Antakya Biennial will not take place

Or so I would assume. Antakya is taken up with more immediate matters, these two years after the Second International Antakya Biennial. The city is preoccupied with the Syrian refugee crisis, and the days when one could take a taxi to Aleppo for US$40 are long gone.

Perhaps the world's artists should stage a Virtual Antakya Biennial online, devoted to the demands of the moment in a city that has no time right now to host the international artworld's migratory curators and collectors.

Antakya, where the disciples were first called Christians; where today there are no fewer than five separate Christian Patriarchs of Antioch, thanks to the appropriately Byzantine division of churches and depositions of bishops and emperors fifteen centuries ago. The Patriarchs have not made it into the English-language headlines lately.

Celje, Celje...where in the world is Celje?

Proving that publicity in English pays off on some level, the art center in Celje, the third largest city in Slovenia, has just advertised its newest exhibition by Franc Purg, "Coming Soon, The Future" (or some such title, it's quoted from memory).

Purg's Celje projects, or the older ones of Skupina ("Group") described on his website, sound like they might be of interest to artists operating in cities in similar global situations; the fact that the Skupina projects described below are over a decade old indicates one of the problems that artists have globally, even when they have a website, in getting their message out somewhere past the city limts of their locality:

MANIFESTO – SKUPINA ("Group")

Manifesto, Celje, 2000

Established in the "historical" town of Celje, we are an informal and exclusively voluntary group that does not bow to any pressures and interests dictated by capital, political parties or institutions. Because we feel a void in the civil sphere or public activity, we wish to fill it by freely responding to problems in the town, Celje. By means of a public manifestation of different opinions, and through provocation, we wish to encourage critical thinking and action on the part of the population of Celje. We are working to turn Celje into a place which allows the coexistence of a wide range of social groups and individuals, thus improving the quality and variety of life in our town which is drowning in passivity and growing increasingly negative towards open-minded initiatives. We are working to improve urban culture, and make the streets a place for communication, social events and the expression of creativity accessible to all inhabitants and visitors.

Miha Ceglar, Brane Piano, Tone Zimsek, Franc Purg are the founders of Skupina. Skupina's activities centre on the local society. Its membership is flexible, changing according to each project.



I HATE CELJE – SKUPINA ("Group")

Roundtable, Celje, 2000

Skupina's first action was a roundtable discussion with various speakers who experience the town of Celje in different ways and who hold a critical view of the town and its life. The event, which took place in the courtyard of the Lower Castle, was attended by a high number of young and middle~aged local people. The speakers were mostly former citizens of Celje, but now live elsewhere. They spoke about how Celje left them indifferent and how the passivity of the local environment cancelled almost all possibilities for articulating different opinions and expressions.

Noplaceness: Art in a Post-Urban Landscape

Noplaceness is now available from www.atlantaartnow.com and from amazon.com.

The book is in English, Portuguese and Chinese, and deals with some of the themes that have been dealt with extensively on this now all but dormant blog: the fate of art in the world's regions, how the regions link to one another in the digital era, how the world's different subcultures are to communicate messages intelligibly to one another now that it is technologically feasible to do so almost instantaneously.

It deals with these topics using the example of some thirty-six artists living and working in Atlanta, Georgia, USA.

Co-authors are Cinqué Hicks, Catherine Fox and Jerry Cullum. It is one of two books I have co-authored this year, the other being In the Eye of the Muses, to which I contributed a long chapter on Hale Woodruff's murals at Clark Atlanta University.